Thinking locally, acquiring globally: the Loockerman family of Delaware, 1630-1790

Abstract: This thesis explores ideas of gentility, family dynasty and social power
through the material experience of the Loockermans, a family that would make its
home in Dover, Delaware in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.
The family’s prosperity in central Delaware was built on a foundation of
wealth and status initiated a century earlier. The first Loockerman in America, Govert
(1633-1670 or 1671), worked as the American agent for an Amsterdam trading
operation. Capitalizing on the heady growth of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam,
he died one of America’s wealthiest merchants. His son, Jacob (1652-1730), followed
the promise of tobacco profits south to the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. In the
next generation, as economic conditions began to favor cereal grains over tobacco, one
of Jacob’s younger sons, Nicholas Loockerman (1697-1771), left Maryland for Kent
County, Delaware. There, land was readily available and the soil not yet exhausted.
As the first of three generations that would call central Delaware home,
Nicholas created a virtually self-sufficient plantation on the foundation of which his
son, Vincent Loockerman, Sr. (1722-1785), operated a lucrative mercantile business,
inhabited a substantial townhouse and acquired the finest decorative arts he could
afford. His son, Vincent Loockerman, Jr. (1747-1790) returned to the rural plantation
life of his grandfather, but like his father, continued to use material culture to
communicate his wealth and lengthy American pedigree. The unique material choices
made by each generation reflected that generation’s local social aspirations as well as the emerging colonial trading networks that linked the increasing demand of rural
Dover to the expanding supply of luxury goods from across the Atlantic world.